Dammit!!

I ripped the length of the fabric and it turned out to be a great big horrible repeat pattern. I had assumed that it would be all over – but of COURSE if it isn’t a dot or an allover pattern it WILL be a repeat – DUH!! I knew that!

So…. what to do??

I am still thinking:

1) I could use the purple/black dot I was going to use for the backing. It’s in the quilt – the octagon third row from the bottom – fourth from the right.

2) I could piece 40 octagons in the border fabric – with red batik centers and use that as a border – with another narrow black outer border to finish it off. But.. what do I do with the corners?

What could solve the corner problem is to remove the black border and sew the border fabric octagons directly to the quilt. That would mean that I would have to remove all of the trimmed orange batik squares and replace the with whole red ones.

3 I could cut the fabric up into strips and sew them together – that would jumble up the pattern.

4) I could make a pieced border – something with squares and or triangles.

5) I could order another fabric. There are lots of all over patterns in the blocks I could use.

6) I could cut it from selvage to selvage – but I HATE joins in the border – always looks like you didn’t have enough fabric. So I am not going to do that.

7) I could do a piano keys with all the fabrics – but I did that on my batik hexagons – not that there is any quilt law against having two quilts with the same borders.

Still thinking.

I think I am going to make up a few octagons with red batik centers and put them up on the wall to see how that goes.

I love this quilt top so much. Oh those colors! Use the fabric you chose. It is the perfect balance for the center. It’s vibrant pattern with the bright red/blue/green compliments the center and its more subdued grey/olive acts as a period at the end of the sentence, “This quilt is finished now.”
Piecing it with a red and/or that gold will connect it to the center.
The piano key would work as well, but it sound like you are wanting to make another one of a kind masterpiece.
I can’t wait to see how this turns out!

Aargh…why are borders so problematic? Remember my brown quilt that finally told me it liked border #4? Hope you don’t have to do that many. Could you add a very thin strip of the orange (I think you have a lot of that) and then a black outer border? I think the quilt itself is too energetic for all those colors in the repeat strip.